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In Donald Trump’s first term, he might have live-tweeted the war in Iran. These days, his presence on Truth Social, the social-media platform that he owns, is more targeted at Trump superfans, many of whom are not entirely enthusiastic about their MAGA leader’s decision to launch a new war of choice in the Middle East. Despite the conflict, Trump has kept up a prolific pace of posting in recent days, but the message to his followers has strongly suggested that he is anything but consumed by the burden of commanding a conflict that has, in not even two weeks, killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, unleashed the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, spread to at least ten additional countries across the region, and cost American taxpayers more than eleven billion dollars and counting.

Instead, he’s relayed his observations about recent “politically suicidal” comments by Gavin “Newscum,” in what was maybe “the most self-destructive interview I’ve ever seen”; bragged about plans to save the Great Lakes from a plague of “rather violent and destructive Asian Carp”; endorsed various Republican congressional candidates, including a challenger to one of Trump’s only remaining public critics inside the G.O.P., the “Worst ‘Congressman’ EVER,” Thomas Massie; and circulated articles about Hillary Clinton, Larry Summers, alleged noncitizen voters, the “rigged” 2020 election, and the “misfit” who will be the new chair of Harvard’s history department.

As for Iran, Trump this week has posted only a few updates, including a poll purporting to show that his war is supported by more than fifty per cent of Americans, a short boast about the U.S. destroying “10 inactive mine laying boats and/or ships,” and a demand that Iran “IMMEDIATELY!” reopen and de-mine the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply is shipped, or face “Military consequences … at a level never seen before.” On Thursday morning, as oil prices soared above a hundred dollars a barrel and the new Supreme Leader—who is the son of the old Supreme Leader—threatened the U.S., Trump posted that high oil prices were actually good for America, since it is the world’s largest producer, and vowed to press on with a war aimed at “stoping an evil Empire.”

The President’s relative reticence on the subject of the most consequential military action he has ever ordered is an observable fact, and not, as his decision to launch the conflict apparently was, based on only a “feeling.” The Washington Post found that less than twenty per cent of the more than two hundred and twenty posts by Trump in the first nine days of the war were related to the conflict, and, when I looked at this week’s output, I found that even fewer—only seven out of his fifty-three posts since Monday morning, or thirteen per cent—were about the war. (The number rises to eleven if you count one about the Iranian men’s soccer team playing in the World Cup and another three demanding asylum in Australia for the Iranian women’s national soccer team.) In campaign-style appearances this week, including one at a rally in Hebron, Kentucky, on Wednesday, Trump was similarly unfocussed on the war—though he did explain, between expounding on the evils of bald eagle-killing windmills and how tricky it is to walk down the stairs of Air Force One, that he personally chose the name Operation Epic Fury after being presented with a long list of options for what to call the conflict, most of which were so boring that he was “falling asleep” listening to them.

There are several possible explanations for this: perhaps Trump is already tired of the war and finds weeks-old interviews from the book tour of the Democratic governor of California more interesting. Or perhaps he’s worried that, after years of promising to avoid the stupid and unnecessary entanglements of past American leaders in the Middle East, the conflict with Iran is simply not popular among his most hard-core supporters. It’s also possible that Trump is concerned about how the war is going, and he doesn’t want to call attention to the spiking gas prices, plunging stock market, and chaotic geopolitical situation which the conflict has so far unleashed. Or maybe he just thinks that people who look at his social-media feed would prefer to see memes of Democratic congressional leaders dressed up in red devil suits, such as the one he posted on Monday morning. The answer, of course, could be all of the above.

The official White House social-media account, meanwhile, has begun posting footage of Operation Epic Fury as if it were a video game. In a video from Wednesday evening, images of missiles hitting targets were interspersed with stock footage of a man bowling a strike; the next shot shows animated bowling pins representing “Iranian Regime Officials” being knocked out by a red-white-and-blue U.S.A. bowling ball. Another video, posted on Thursday, even more explicitly gamifies the war, which has thus far killed seven American service members and more than a thousand Iranians. There’s bowling in this one, too, but also archery, baseball, basketball, boxing, golf, and tennis. Thus does the world’s leading superpower celebrate its killing power.

It’s true that, in his many comments to reporters in recent days, the President has been far more voluble about the war, if not exactly clear about its objectives, progress, or likely duration. He’s called it a war, a major combat operation, and, on Wednesday, “an excursion, a little excursion.” He has suggested that the United States would take over the Strait of Hormuz in order to secure safe passage for oil tankers, and also that there was no problem at all with the Strait of Hormuz as it is. He made news by claiming that it was not the U.S. but possibly Iran itself which had sent an American-made Tomahawk missile to kill at least a hundred and seventy-five people at a girls’ school on the first day of the war. Never mind that Iran does not possess Tomahawk missiles.

Perhaps his most closely scrutinized statements have been those concerning when and how the war might end. These, too, have been confounding to the point of nonsensical. This week, Trump has said that “we won,” but also that “we’re not finished yet.” He has demanded unconditional surrender and regime change, and also denied that victory would require either of those things. At his rally in Kentucky, he spoke of staying the course, whatever that course is, almost as though trying to convince himself. “We don’t want to leave early, do we?” he asked the audience. “We got to finish the job, right?”

In the past, perhaps the only reassuring thing that could be said about Trump was that he was not so reckless and unhinged as to take the United States into a major new war. Avoiding armed conflict was, after all, one fixed principle—besides the magically transformative powers of tariffs—that he truly seemed to believe. As he ran for reëlection in 2024, his two key campaign promises, aside from mass deportations, were that he would fix the economy and not start any wars. Even his voters might have thought twice about granting Trump unchecked life-and-death power over millions if they thought he might actually use it.

And yet here we are, scrutinizing Trump’s voluminous and incoherent ramblings for clues to the future of a conflict that may well rewrite the map of the Middle East for years to come.

The need for this level of Trumpology itself is a sign of how swiftly America’s democratic institutions have declined. Congress, despite the Constitution’s specific grant of warmaking powers to the national legislature, has opted out. The weaklings around Trump in the most senior positions of our government can do nothing other than agree with him. (“Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war,” the Times wrote. “But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success.”) The Israelis, with whom the U.S. launched the war, may have a more coherent plan or timetable, but as I have heard firsthand this week, the one factor they cannot control is the President of the United States, who might singlehandedly decide to pull the plug on the operation at any moment.

There’s no point in deceiving ourselves: Trump now sounds little different than Vladimir Putin in how he justifies the conflict—and in how much power he has claimed for himself to dictate America’s participation in it. I don’t know how exactly the war will end, but I do know that, however and whenever it does, there’s only one possible outcome as far as Trump is concerned: a late-night social media post emblazoned with the word “VICTORY!” ♦

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If you’ve been going to the theatre lately, you’ve seen plenty of what I’ve started to think of as “piñata plays.” In this sort of story, a big family gets together and there are a lot of secrets. For most of the evening, the mood is darkly funny and a little ominous, as the siblings take undermining jabs and the in-laws roll their eyes. Then, in the final act, there’s a hugely satisfying, usually drunken throwdown in which every single person gets to take a whack at the piñata. All the secrets pour out, the revelations of infidelity and addiction and so on, as the group gives vent to the stuff that’s previously been unsayable—not to fix anything, mind you, since some things can’t be fixed.

These plays are often brilliant, and even lesser variants are fun to watch, because piñata-whacking itself is a naughty thrill, a cathartic fantasy for anyone with a family and/or a secret. But there’s something equally pleasurable—and more rare—about a play that pulls off the opposite trick, that revels in the way family members can love one another, can stay connected and build instead of destroying, even amid loss and uncertainty. It’s a hard thing to make dramatic and an easy thing to make corny, but it’s as authentic a theme as dysfunction. In the buoyant revival of Clare Barron’s 2014 father-daughter play, “You Got Older,” which is running under A24’s new management at the Cherry Lane Theatre, the creators find glory in something ordinary: an adult child and an aging parent trying their best.

The story is simple: Mae (Alia Shawkat), a thirty-two-year-old lawyer, newly single and unemployed (she’d been dating her boss), has come home to rural Washington to stay with her widowed father, who’s being treated for a “weird, mysterious cancer.” Her mom died of cancer, too, years earlier. She’s trying to be responsible, to behave like a grownup, but being home makes her keyed-up, antsy, and she retreats into her sexual imagination for comfort. The play consists of a series of sharp, realistic dialogues broken up with bursts of surreality: Mae and her dad talking awkwardly in the garden; Mae at a local bar, sporting bright-red short shorts and showing a near-stranger her rash; and, now and then, a fantasy cowboy, who keeps threatening to tie Mae up, whether she likes it or not.

Shawkat, with her warm, amused eyes and her mop of curls, is a perfect carrier for Mae’s air of abjection, flopping around her bed like a horny, gloomy Raggedy Ann. She is particularly adroit at playing charmers whom people forgive, sometimes too easily, like the millennial trickster Dory on the TV series “Search Party.” But the whole production is smartly allied with that openhearted sensibility, down to Arnulfo Maldonado’s simple, homey scenic design, in which wood-panelled walls glide around to suggest a garden, a bar, a hospital, a Midwestern bedroom. Directed by Anne Kauffman, the show trusts its audience not to need much guidance: when the set abruptly shifts to reveal Mae’s three siblings, it’s thrilling how instantly believable their teasing bond is.

Still, the most remarkable performance at the Cherry Lane is by Peter Friedman, who plays the kind of father you rarely see in art: a good one. It’s a hard sort of acting to describe, a spectacle of humility and self-awareness, unshowy and confident. A businessman with a genial, chatty energy, Mae’s father, facing mortality, is eager to help his daughter to know him better, not as a child but as an adult, to create a closeness that she clearly craves but is frightened of. As she raises walls, he builds bridges—and she scrambles across, absorbing bits of wisdom, a few of which feel tied to her secret thoughts about control. At one point, he startles her by explaining that, unlike her, he’s not terrified of feeling helpless: “Like going to the dentist. I love that. You just lie back and open your mouth. What can you do?”

Late in the show, Friedman’s character plays his daughter the song “Firewood,” by Regina Spektor, a songwriter whose work—droll and ardent—shares a lot with Barron’s play. It’s his cancer theme song, he explains; her mom had also had one. “You guys were weird,” she tells him—it’s Mae’s reflex word, her way of shooing away excess feeling. “Some of the lyrics are a little overdramatic, but I think it’s a pretty good song,” he adds, excitedly; he wants her to listen. She is reluctant to do it, but then she does it anyway, absorbing the song’s rapturous optimism. The audience does, too: we listen to that song all the way through, feeling the time pass.

Wallace Shawn’s haunting “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” directed by his long-term creative partner, André Gregory, is less a piñata play than it is a public autopsy, in which a family of erudite, self-possessed medical examiners stand over the corpse of their own legacy, poking it gently. There are four people implicated in the crime: Dick (Josh Hamilton), a rich, famous, charming, and extroverted New York novelist; Elle (Maria Dizzia), his saintly but quietly furious public-school-teacher wife, whom he fell for when he was sixteen; Tim, their squirrelly pervert of a son (played with the worst mustache in history by the delightful John Early), and Elaine (Hope Davis), Dick’s lover, a misanthrope with a clear-eyed understanding of her own choices.

It’s explosive material that, in a different artist’s hands, might have inspired a third-act screaming match over an Upper East Side dinner table, with snifters flying. Instead, Shawn stages his story as a panel of intimate testimonies, confided to us alone. The four characters sit on chairs, facing the audience. Sometimes they hold mugs. As the spotlight settles on each of them, that person unspools a monologue, a candid account of their origins, their desires and dreams, their galaxy of excuses and explanations. These stories slowly form a cracked family portrait, like a jigsaw puzzle. Are the characters speaking to us from beyond the grave? Perhaps. Overhead, images of moths float by—a reference to “moth day,” which, Dick confides, with a nostalgic smile, is the phrase he invented as a small child to describe the day we die, guided to the grave, “vaguely and flutteringly,” by blind moths. Then he tells us how it felt to die.

Going in, I’d assumed that “Moth Days” would be Shawn’s first whack at his own family piñata, one that involves this magazine. Shawn’s father was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, referred to by the staff, worshipfully, as Mr. Shawn; after his death, at eighty-five, Lillian Ross, one of his star reporters, wrote a memoir revealing their decades-long affair. “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is, it’s true, a play about an adult son who is wrestling with his famous father’s secret life. A key story is strikingly similar to a story from Ross’s memoir: Elaine rushes to Elle’s apartment after Dick’s death, then meets Tim at the door, as if she were a vampire requesting permission to enter. But the parallels aren’t precise; they’re more like images in a mirror that’s slyly tilted to disorient the viewer. Dick, played by Hamilton with a boyish glee, is a chipper, gregarious sybarite, while Mr. Shawn was an introvert’s introvert. Similarly, Early’s dissolute failson feels less like a self-portrait than like a darkly comic deflection, a gargoyle-ish stand-in for his creator’s anxieties. (I was reminded of the rule that, when you write a roman à clef, you should give your enemy a small penis, since he’ll never say that it’s him.)

Instead of an attack, the play offers something more unsettling, a meditation on the allure of a bad life and the trap of a good one. Hamilton’s cheerful Dick tells a story out of Eden, or maybe “A Star Is Born”: by his account, he was an unconfident nobody until he met his decent, dazzling catch of a wife—and then, as he bloomed, she faded. While she buried herself in lonely motherhood, untouched glamour, and the martyrdom of do-gooder work, Dick went morally bankrupt—gradually, then suddenly. “Well, I’ve written these things, and people really like them, and I think I deserve a little reward for that,” he explains, beaming, in a hypnotic homage to cocktails, parties with famous strangers, the louche pleasures of Manhattan night clubs, freedoms available only among wicked, clever peers.

It should feel damning. Wallace Shawn’s own artistic path began with the O.G. piñata play, one in which children reproach parents for their lies, selfishness, and neglect: at thirteen, long before he learned the truth about his father, he attended Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” then insisted that his parents see it, too. His early plays were finger-pointing confrontations with the audience, and in “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” from 1985, “The Designated Mourner,” from 1996, and the 1990 monologue “The Fever”—which Shawn has been delivering twice a week at the same venue—he built a reputation as a caustic moralist, slicing through bourgeois hypocrisies. “Moth Days,” however, doesn’t take sides. It’s defiantly tender. Hamilton—playing a narcissist who radiates innocence even when he describes betrayal—is easy to love. So is Dizzia, as Dick’s wife, the dark cello to his bright violin, particularly when her eyes narrow and she unleashes her truest, rudest, strangest feelings. Davis is dryly funny as a cynic who introduces herself as someone who had “never been the sort of person about whom people would say, ‘You can always count on her in an emergency.’ ” Early, as the family’s dented nepo baby, is a peculiar fount of profane insight, twisted but touchingly damaged. As I watched, the word “seduction” kept coming to mind: even at their worst (incest fantasies, grooming), you want to listen to this quartet forever, which is a good thing, since the play is three hours long. Could it be shorter? Sure—the second and third acts could have been combined. But I was never bored, and more often was swept away by the text’s candor and depth, its merciless generosity.

A single scene late in the play breaks the spell of Shawn’s structure, when two characters turn to each other and acknowledge, with relief, the quality they share: an honest sleaziness, not a false decency. It’s an observation that feels like the creator’s most penetrating one—the idea that, looking back on life, it may mean more to be understood than to be virtuous. Dick’s life leaves scars, which don’t heal. But the love between cruel people is a real love, too. ♦

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“Love Story,” an FX series produced by Ryan Murphy, drops audiences straight into the lives of one of the most talked-about couples of the nineties: J.F.K., Jr., and the style icon Carolyn Bessette. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how the show re-creates the look and fashion of the era in granular detail while reducing the relationship itself to a generic fairy tale. Despite its many flaws, the show has been embraced with a zeal that reflects the enduring allure of the Kennedys—often said to be the closest thing America has to a royal family. The hosts consider why this political dynasty has so persisted in the popular imagination, discussing everything from the work of the paparazzo Ron Galella to Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie,” two very different treatments of the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “Love Story” ’s focus on style underscores how much the family’s legacy lives in aesthetics, which risks obscuring some of the darker chapters of its history. “It does seem like we have ever more efficiently stripped the Kennedys and their image, and their style, from any notions of political power,” Cunningham says. “The look of something and the sort of moral thrust of something are not always one to one working in parallel.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Love Story” (2026–)
“Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” by Elizabeth Beller
“How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away with This?,” by Daryl Hannah (The New York Times)
“American Prince: JFK Jr.” (2025)
“Seinfeld” (1989-98)
“Jackie” (2016)
“The Kennedy Imprisonment,” by Garry Wills
The photography of Ron Galella
“JFK” (1991)
“A Battle with My Blood,” by Tatiana Schlossberg (The New Yorker)

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

On February 28th, just hours after the United States and Israel struck Iran, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the supreme leader of Yemen’s Houthi movement, gave a speech denouncing the attacks as “a blatant, criminal, and barbaric act targeting the Muslim Iranian people.” He expressed “complete solidarity” with Iran and urged the entire Muslim world to apply pressure, of all forms, on the U.S. and Israel. The following day, at his behest, tens of thousands of people in Yemen took to the streets to protest the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They carried portraits of the cleric and condemned America and Israel, using language that mirrored the Houthis’ motto: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”

The Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite Islamist rebel group, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, are among Iran’s most powerful and resilient allies. They are a key part of the so-called Axis of Resistance, an informal Iran-led military coalition in the Middle East. During his speech, al-Houthi suggested that the Houthis were ready to lend military support to Iran: “We are fully prepared for any necessary developments,” he said. And yet, as the war continues into its second week, the Houthis are essentially M.I.A.

Iran’s other proxies, meanwhile, have done little to bolster Tehran in the war. Hezbollah, the paramilitary group in Lebanon, got involved in the conflict, disregarding the state’s sovereignty and firing missiles and drones from Lebanese territory at an Israeli military site near Haifa. The projectiles fell short, but Israel carried out retaliatory strikes in Beirut and across Lebanon, killing at least six hundred people, including ninety-one children, injuring more than a thousand, and displacing some eight hundred thousand. In Iraq, pro-Iranian Shiite militias have attempted a series of small-scale drone and rocket attacks at Israel, and have targeted U.S. forces and personnel in Erbil and Baghdad, and in Jordan. But few of these have caused damage. “Their capabilities remain limited and not consequential at all,” Renad Mansour, a senior fellow and the project director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told me.

This was not what Iran envisioned when it began developing the Axis of Resistance, in the nineteen-eighties, pouring billions of dollars into cultivating a network that would help defend its borders, deter its enemies, and project influence across the region. The coalition started with Hezbollah, in 1982, which Iran helped establish in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. It eventually expanded to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in Syria; various Iraqi Shiite militias, such as the Popular Mobilization Forces; and Sunni militants, including Hamas. The Houthis, once a little-known insurgent group in northern Yemen, became a major military and political force after the Arab Spring, using nationwide unrest and government instability to seize large swaths of the country, including the capital, Sanaa. With the help of Iran, which provided training in addition to ballistic missiles and other advanced weaponry, the Houthis became adept at asymmetric warfare, using low-cost, high-impact methods like drones and rockets against more well-resourced militaries. With such tactics, they survived a years-long bombing campaign by a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition seeking to reinstall Yemen’s elected government.

All of Iran’s proxies share a deep ideological hatred of Israel and America. “The logic of the proxies for Iran, primarily, was this idea of forward defense, which meant that, instead of fighting in Iran, let’s do our fighting in other areas,” Mansour explained. But now that Iran is engaged in “a direct fight against the U.S. and Israel and its interests across the region,” he continued, these allied groups are “less necessary.”

Still, the Houthis could be especially valuable to Iran during the current conflict, as the group has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to withstand U.S. and Israeli strikes. This includes two American-led campaigns against Yemen—first under the Biden Administration, in 2024, then under the Trump Administration, last year, which pummelled Houthi positions and weapons arsenals for months. Not only did the group remain intact but their survival may have bolstered their image in Yemen and their grip on the country.

Were the Houthis to get involved now, they could open several new fronts in the war at once. The group could fire drones and missiles at commercial ships in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, as it has done before, shutting down a vital shipping lane that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Significant amounts of the world’s crude oil, liquefied natural gas, manufactured goods, electronics, and food flow through this passage. Shutting it down—coupled with Iran’s choking off the Strait of Hormuz—could suffocate global trade, cause oil and energy prices to soar even higher, and prompt stock-market crashes all over the world, putting added pressure on the Trump Administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war. Already, some shippers are avoiding the Red Sea route, anticipating Houthi attacks. (Last spring, as the U.S. struck Yemen, the Houthis claimed to have launched missiles and drones at the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, an American aircraft carrier in the Red Sea.) The Houthis could also fire long-range missiles at Israel, and target Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations—including their oil, energy, and economic infrastructure—from the south, as Iran strikes these countries from the north, in a joint pincer movement.

It’s possible that the plan is for the Houthis to join the conflict later on, if there is a long-drawn-out war, and if the Gulf countries, which so far have been focussed on protecting themselves from Iranian strikes, go on the offensive. (On Saturday, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian President, apologized to the Gulf states for its strikes, but the attacks have persisted.) Mohammed al-Basha, a Middle East politics-and-security expert, told me that the Houthis have been readying themselves for action. In recent weeks, he and other analysts have been told that the Houthis have deployed missile launchers, drone-operating units, and military brigades throughout northern Yemen—from the Red Sea coastlines to the border with Saudi Arabia. The group is also said to be digging tunnels, building bunkers, and erecting barriers and other defensive structures in case of an attack by the United States and Israel. Ahmed Nagi, a senior analyst for Yemen for the International Crisis Group, told me that Iran and its proxies believe in “gradual escalation,” understanding that it is perhaps not “wise to use your wild cards all at once.” The Houthis are Iran’s biggest wild card. And so the fact that the group has not yet entered the war can only be seen as “a calculated choice,” one that has been “fully coördinated with the Iranians,” Nagi said. “They believe that Iran, for now, can manage the situation and face all these challenges alone.” But, if the conflict widens even more, he added, “the Houthis will jump in. They need some time to assess the situation before joining the fight.”

That need to assess speaks to the enormous shifts that are currently under way in the Middle East, as Israel and the U.S. remake the region. It also unveils the struggle within Iran’s constellation of proxies to remain relevant, as their primary benefactor faces its greatest existential threat since its war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties. Their calculus on whether to enter the war is shaped by several questions: Can they survive U.S. and Israeli retaliation, including attacks targeting their senior leaders? Do they possess enough missiles and drones, and the ability to build or acquire more advanced weapons, to sustain a prolonged war and defense? Will they be weakened domestically by entering the war? And is there something to gain—politically, economically, or diplomatically—by avoiding conflict?

Last June, during the Twelve-Day War—when Israel attacked Iran and the U.S. later joined in, striking Iranian nuclear facilities—the answers to these questions persuaded Iran’s proxies to remain largely on the sidelines. By then, significant cracks in the Axis of Resistance had emerged. In 2020, an American drone strike had assassinated General Qassem Suleimani, who oversaw support for Iran’s proxies and was widely viewed as the theocracy’s second most powerful leader, after Khamenei. After Hamas attacked Israel, on October 7, 2023, triggering a broad Israeli military campaign in Gaza, Israel killed Hamas leaders and decimated its military capabilities. In Lebanon and parts of Syria, Israel detonated thousands of pagers of Hezbollah officials and bombed the group’s headquarters in southern Beirut, killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In Syria, Israeli strikes killed senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, crippling Iran’s coördination and control. Iran was either unable or unwilling to help Hamas or Hezbollah fend off Israeli attacks. Nor did it help quell a rebel offensive that ousted the Assad dictatorship, in December, 2024. Iran largely withdrew its forces from Syria, ending more than a decade of Iranian influence over the country.

The Twelve-Day War showcased the U.S. and Israel’s military supremacy, but what was most unsettling to Iran’s proxies was the way in which Israel’s intelligence apparatus had infiltrated Iran, killing top security officials and nuclear scientists who were housed at high-security military complexes. Hezbollah, severely weakened and struggling to rebuild itself, didn’t join the conflict, nor did Iraq’s Shiite militias. The Houthis fired a few missiles at Israel early on and then turned silent; they had just emerged from their own conflict with the U.S., and Israel was in the midst of bombing Yemen and targeting senior Houthi commanders and officials. At the time, several regional experts told me that top security and political figures inside the Iraqi Shiite militias and the Houthis were limiting their use of technology, using burner phones and spending minimal time online to prevent Israel from tracking them.

This time around, Hezbollah got involved because “they feel that Iran is facing an existential war, and what happens to Iran is going to happen to them, so in a way they are intertwined in Hezbollah’s future,” Randa Slim, a program lead for the Middle East at the Stimson Center, told me. “Ideologically, they are bound to intervene once asked, and religiously they have a duty to intervene once the Supreme Leader is killed.” Khamenei was both Hezbollah’s political ally and its paramount spiritual guide; the group followed his religious rulings and used his authority to legitimize violent acts. And yet Hezbollah’s choice to plunge the country into war has fractured the group, which is now facing backlash from its own supporters, and from the Lebanese government. In Iraq, too, Iran’s allied militias are fragmented. Smaller ones have joined the war for ideological reasons and to avenge Khamenei’s death. But the Badr Organization, one of the largest Shiite militias and Iran’s oldest proxy in Iraq, has yet to get involved. Its leaders are part of the Iraqi government, and have access to lucrative oil contracts that are worth millions of dollars more now that oil prices have spiked, Mansour, the senior fellow at Chatham House, told me. “All these groups, including the Houthis, they’re all in survival mode,” he went on, “and they’re all just, from their perspectives, pragmatically trying to understand what the best decisions would be.”

The Houthis, at least at the moment, have more to gain from staying out of the war. As the Axis of Resistance has weakened, they’ve grown in stature. When the war in Gaza erupted, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinians, and imposed their chokehold on Red Sea shipping lanes. Last May, in a ceasefire deal following nearly two months of U.S. aerial assaults, the Houthis agreed to stop targeting American ships—but not Israeli ones. President Trump claimed victory, whereas the Houthis declared it was the U.S. that had backed down, strengthening their resistance credentials.

Despite their bravado, the Houthis have suffered significant losses during their conflict with Israel. In late August, Israel struck Sanaa, killing senior Houthi figures, including the group’s Prime Minister and several other ministers. In October, the group announced that its military chief of staff, Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari, a popular figure in the country, had also been killed in the strikes. Large crowds turned out for his state funeral, and he still appears on billboards in the Yemeni capital, a constant reminder of how much the Houthis have lost. Their recent buildup of defenses is likely less about getting ready to support Iran and more about preventing Israel and the U.S. from killing their supreme leader. After Khamenei and Nasrallah, “Abdul Malik al-Houthi is the long-lasting leader that is still standing from that generation,” Basha said.

The Houthis are also facing significant domestic challenges. Yemen’s economy is in tatters, and the country is facing a dire humanitarian crisis. There are cash shortages, and the salaries for civil servants haven’t been paid out, even for many Houthi fighters. During this holy fasting month of Ramadan, many Yemenis can hardly afford basic items, sparking widespread anger at the Houthi authorities, who are also under pressure from U.S. and European sanctions. Politically, too, there are concerns. Saudi Arabia is seeking to unify anti-Houthi forces in southern Yemen following the recent military withdrawal of the United Arab Emirates and the implosion of a key but divisive militia it backed. The Houthis are also seeking billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to pay salaries and other government expenses as part of a stalled political agreement. They could threaten to attack in order to extract concessions from the kingdom, but targeting Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iran could prove unwise. The Houthis are concerned about the day after, Nagi, of the International Crisis Group, said. Even if they don’t join the war, they could become targets of the U.S. and Israel later, or face harsher sanctions should Iran become significantly weakened or were the regime to collapse. “They have tough options, and each option is worse than the other,” Nagi said.

Unlike Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias, the Houthis are not politically beholden to Iran. And, unlike many Shiites around the world, they didn’t view Khamenei as their supreme religious authority; that role is filled by Abdul Malik al-Houthi and his ancestors. (The Houthis believe in Zaydism, a branch of Shia Islam that emerged in the eighth century, whose followers are almost exclusively found in Yemen.) Iran may have positioned the Houthis as a regional player that can exert pressure on Iran’s neighbors, but the Houthis have always put their own interests first. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, but it’s transactional in its nature,” Slim told me.

During the past few years, the Houthis have become less reliant on Iran for weapons, smuggling in drone components from Chinese companies and small arms from the Horn of Africa. Nevertheless, without Iran’s help, the Houthis would not be the force they are today. And so the rhetorical support for Iran remains fierce and loud—on the streets, on television, and on social media. On March 5th, in another televised speech, Abdul Malik al-Houthi said, “Our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it.” But if the Houthis do respond, it won’t just be to help Iran—it’ll be to help themselves. “I don’t know the extent to which Iran could make the Houthis do something they don’t ultimately want to anymore,” Mansour said. “Iran is not the same Iran from more than a decade ago, and the Houthis aren’t the same Houthis from back then. The power balance has shifted.” ♦